


swallow

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, But it's a metaphor, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Love is about eating one another babes, sexual cannibalism, vore adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26217241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: May he rot to make earth. May he nourish one small patch of soil, one tuft of grass. That’s where he’ll retire, in the gut of a carrion bird. Vulture shit. A fitting tribute. All the memorial he’s ever going to get.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 9
Kudos: 40





	swallow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stillmadaboutpetra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/gifts).



Geralt knows with surety how it will end. Has known, has been told, has been reminded again by blade and by claw and by lecture. Ever since the first time his grip tightened clumsily on a sword, since the blood-sweat of the Trials, since his first kill.

He anticipates it every time he tightens the straps of his armor and hears the leather creak and adjusts the sheath slung on his back and tests the give of the straps and feels the crack of the soles of his rotting boots and scents the wind howling and thinks how this may be the time he doesn’t survive.

It’s inevitable.

One day he will strike a blow and be parried by a talon. Or he will twist to sink deep and his sword will lodge tight into a carapace. Or he will duck away and not dive far enough. Or he will fall back to knock against a cliff face in just the wrong way. In any case, the last thing he will feel and see is the tug of his organs by beak or pincer or maw. The rope-taut numbed give of innards drawn out and out.

He keeps a little prayer reserved for that last moment, though he’s not a religious man. The prayer is for the lonely creature who finally eats him, maybe, or for the people it will kill after he doesn’t manage to kill it or for those vanishing few who will mourn a Witcher who’s been tugged into a traditional Witcher’s retirement.

May it be over and done with quickly, he prays. May he bring the beast along with him if he is able, may its wounds fester, may it know peace. May no one witness it, no one be scarred by it, no one in need of rescue watch the beast’s cold, cruel, hungry eyes turn their way next.

May the beast kill him first and then eat, and if not, may the pain be so great that unconsciousness eclipses his survival instinct. May the agony be so intense that it passes into white noise and he feels only oblivion, so that he may watch himself be torn and devoured with distracted, distant observation.

May he watch his own dissection a moment or so and then may he blur into finality and rest in the belly of the creature. May his blood and bones and organs sit as toxic sludge in the creature’s body and may he end its suffering even in death and may the both of them go extinct.

He does not remember being taught the ways to gut and harvest a downed creature, his memory full of moth-eaten holes, but he can remember the echoes of the lesson. He knows just where to cut, how to slop through the ichor between a beast’s cracked ribs and draw out the valuable morsels. Here, some oozing organ, a scrap of flesh to stew into a potion, a poison, a dye, a delicacy.

Someone in some market somewhere will buy this once-alive bile duct of this half-starved monstrous refugee fumbling through an unfamiliar world, all gnashing teeth and desperate claws, and say it cures impotence, say it reverses hair loss, say it will make your wife fertile as a floodplain delta, yes, yes, just part with your coin purse and it can do all of that.

He’s just meat, the same as most of the monsters he hunts.

Some of them are less corporeal, sure, but even a wraith remembers being a body, while it flickers and howls. Geralt digs in a shallow grave until he unearths its bones. He murmurs a word, presses spark to mummified flesh like flint to tinder, the wraith shrieking and popping with the memory of burning flesh. A leg of venison over a campfire. Dripping fat and charred sinew.

Geralt eats and his tongue is a flame. Rest now, he prays, and the wraith sputters out and into silence.

It’s the most he could hope for at his own end. The best case scenario. Someone or something to devour him. Kaer Morhen burns its Witchers when there’s a body to be found, and if the vultures swinging overhead are allowed to stoop nearer and pick through the blackened aftermath, then that’s just the natural workings of an ecosystem in balance.

May he rot to make earth. May he nourish one small patch of soil, one tuft of grass. That’s where he’ll retire, in the gut of a carrion bird. Vulture shit. A fitting tribute. All the memorial he’s ever going to get.

* * *

He loses his surety the moment he tucks the girl in his arms.

The wood swells with fog and cricket noise, and he holds her snug in the depression of his ribcage. Something inside him wishes it could snap and unfurl his own ribs like a protective cage around her.

Ciri consumes him, just as she has most nights in dreams. For years, for years, one reason he fought off sleep. Though before, she had been a featureless shape. A wisp of smoke with a child’s face, neither girl nor boy, and in the dreams, it reached out both hands with open palms. His dream self struggled, fought, screamed, and the child reached inside him and twisted and held a raw, wet thing in cupped hands. Red and thumping organ meat. The child’s hungry mouth open, its stomach gurgling.

Now, he gives himself to her. Flays himself and offers up the morsels. He is all exposed nerves and vulnerability. Loving somebody is like that, he finally realizes.

Geralt no longer knows how he will die, but he thinks maybe like this. Bent to hold this girl into the crook of his body while she burrows inside. This is the shelter that he can offer, as poor as it is.

He only knows the sort of love that is a sword and shield, that is a clasped shoulder and a _may we meet again next winter or may I follow you someday along a different Path_. He knows only the sort of love that is a hope that when his brothers meet their end that the beast kills first and then eats.

Before Ciri, that’s what he knows about love. In the midst of her, she overwrites the lot of it.

He does not wait for her to hold out her cupped hands.

* * *

Yennefer cuts with a knife and fork.

She sits straight and poised and playing at being proper and digs the serrated edge along the grain of his flesh, parting it with some determined see-sawing. He’s lean meat and gristle. Geralt gives to her. He lays down on the table, spread-eagle and bubbling with something strange and hopeful and fatalistic.

He runs back into that house. He makes a wish. He sucks in great gasps of air while a prick of blood wells up along his sternum and the knife presses deep and she guts him. He lies back and lets her.

She sets down her utensils. She dabs at the corner of her mouth.

Before Ciri, that’s all either of them knew about love.

Afterward, in the wake of _protect her find her keep her safe_ , it’s fraught and messy and new. Yennefer sinks her fingers in and grips and howls, and Geralt still lies back and lets her but now he’s grasping back. He scrabbles with blunt fingernails.

Hers, not blunt, part the soft skin of his belly and tear, knuckle their way inside.

He thinks of being swallowed and engulfed, of nestling snug into a hollow place inside her belly, womb-dark.

Geralt will let her devour him, whatever is left.

* * *

Geralt still knows with surety how it will end. The same as he always was told, always imagined. No difference in the how or why of it. A messy, painful end.

But now, he knows who will bury him, who will hold his memory in their teeth and swallow. He knows what he has nourished. Rot to fresh earth to fruit again, plucked from the tree and eaten.

May their bellies be full of him. May he have been enough.


End file.
